A Romance in the House of Rosebery

The
Primroses, Earls of Rosebery, and Lords Primrose and Dalmeny in the
peerage of Scotland, are descended from an eminent but un-titled family
who, three centuries ago, owned the broad acres of the barony of Primrose,
in the county of Fife. For two or three generations they held high legal
posts in Scotland under the government of our later Stuart sovereigns, and
one of them, a Gentleman of the Bed-chamber to Prince George of Denmark,
was raised to the earldom in 1703. His son and successor, James, second
earl, had a son who bore by courtesy his father's second title, and was
known as Lord Dalmeny. His name is omitted from the peerage, probably on
account of an irregular and romantic marriage which he had contracted, in
perfect good faith and innocence, with a certain lassie of plebeian
extraction in one of our East Anglian counties, the facts of which I am
able to lay before my readers from a private and authentic source.
The young lady to, whom Lord Dalmeny thus became allied was named
Kate, or, as she was always called, 'Kitty' Cannon, and her parents were
substantial yeomen, occupying a large farm in the parish of Thorpe, which
lies at the extreme north-east end of Essex, jutting far out into the
German Ocean. They were plain people; but their daughter had the good, or
bad, fortune of being extremely pretty, and when little more than a girl
she was admired by the gay young men of ‘the quality’ who came down from
London to stay with the dissipated Earl of Rochford, at St. Osyth's
Priory, and with another ministerial gentleman, who shall be nameless, at
Mistley Park, near Harwich. However, none of these titled individuals
condescended to breathe in her ear a single word about matrimony; so, when
she was just twenty, she gave her hand, and (it is to be presumed) her
heart also, to the rector of Thorpe, a Reverend Mr. Dough.
A quiet and remote parsonage, however, was not exactly suited to the
taste of a young lady who had once sipped the cup of flattery from
gentlemen who belonged to the clubs about St. James's, and who moved in
courtly circles. Accordingly, one evening when she was staying in London,
being present at a ball in the neighborhood of the then fashionable
district of Covent Garden, she managed to slip out, unobserved by her
husband, and to run away with John, Lord Dalmeny, who was only a few years
older than herself. She had no children, and doubtless his lordship was
led to believe that she was a widow, and quite at her own disposal.The pair went abroad,
and remained for two or three years traveling in the sunny south ; but in
the early summer of 1752 Kitty Cannon, or Kitty Gough, was taken seriously
ill at Florence. Her illness turned into a galloping consumption, and in
the May or June of that year she died. A few hours only before her death,
she wrote upon a scrap of paper, ‘I am really the wife, of the Reverend
Mr. Gough, vicar of Thorpe, near Colchester, Essex ; my maiden name was
Kitty Cannon, and my family belong to the same parish. Bury me there.’
Lord Dalmeny's young wife, as he always thought her to be, was gone
before he was able to realize the full meaning of the lines which she had
written. At first he was disposed to reject them, as a creation of her
sick brain ; it was impossible for him to believe that the dear companion
of his last few years was guilty of bigamy. But, whether true or false, he
at once resolved, as she lay in her coffin at Florence, to give effect to
her last wish, and he instantly prepared to carry her remains over to
England.
The body of this lovely woman was embalmed, and secured in ‘a very
fine oaken coffin, decorated with six large silver plates, and it was then
put into a strong outer case of common deal, which concealed the ominous
shape of its contents. The jewelry and wardrobe of the lady were packed
in other chests, and with this cumbersome baggage Lord Dalmeny set out
upon his melancholy journey by land to the south of France. At Marseilles
he was able to engage a vessel to carry him and his packages by sea round
to Dover, under the assumed name of Mr. Williams, a merchant of Hamburg;
and on landing at Dover he transferred his belongings to a small coaster,
which he hired to carry him to Harwich, then a busy and bustling port,
only a few miles distant from Thorpe. The vessel, however, was forced by
contrary winds to make for Colchester instead, where the Custom House
officers came down to the ‘Hythe' to examine the freight before they would
allow it to be landed. They could not recognize in the elegant and
polished gentleman, whom they saw dressed in the deepest of black and
bowed down by grief, a common business man from Hamburg; and they very
naturally thought, as only seven years had passed since the rebellion of
1745, that he was some emissary of ‘the Pretender.' So their loyalty took
the alarm. It certainly was the plain duty of Custom House officials to
see that no French tobacco, gloves, lace, or brocade was brought over in
these large boxes without paying duty to King George. Accordingly, without
giving any attention to the remonstrance's of Mr. Williams, they were about
to plunge their knives into the larger case, when the Hamburg merchant
drew his sword and told them to desist. He at once made a clean breast of
the affair, telling them that he was an Englishman, and, what was more, an
English nobleman, and that the chest upon the wharf contained the body of
his dead wife. But this explanation did not satisfy the officers, who were
not sure that there was not a murder at the bottom of the transaction.
They therefore at once broke the outer chest, tore open the coffin lid,
and lifted the cere-cloths from the face of the embalmed corpse. Lord
Dalmeny was taken, along with the coffin, to a church near at hand, where
he was detained until he could prove the truth of his story.
The news soon spread about, and crowds of the neighboring villagers
came to see the fair lady's face as she lay in her coffin. Many of these
identified her features as those of the Kitty Cannon who had spent her
childhood at Thorpe, and who had disappeared soon after her marriage with
the vicar of that parish.
But here was a further difficulty for his lordship; for, though the
rest of his story was transparently true, it was clear that the lady was
not really his lawful wife. A communication was at once forwarded to the
vicar, who lost no time in coming over to the Hythe and recognizing the
corpse as that of his vanished partner. But what a mystery the whole
affair was to him as well as to Lord Dalmeny, to whom at first, as may be
supposed, he entertained and expressed no very friendly feelings. But he
was soon pacified. Possibly he had preached but lately a sermon enforcing
forgiveness of even intended wrongs, and here was a wrong which clearly
was not intended. Accordingly as soon as he was able to contemplate the
matter in all its bearings---the deception which had been practiced on the
poor young nobleman, and the passionate constancy which had borne him up
through his toilsome journey by land and voyage by sea in order to gratify
his supposed wife's last prayer, and the faithfulness with which, like a
dog, he watched beside her coffin in the church---he felt that he could
not refuse to forgive the wrong, and he consented to meet Lord Dalmeny on
a friendly footing.
The interview between the two rival husbands is said in a family
record to have been very moving,' and no doubt must have been touching in
the extreme; the only wonder is that it has not been taken by play-writers
to work out as a plot for the stage. I am not able to tell my readers the
exact words in which Lord Dalmeny assured the husband of his entire
innocence of fraud, and of the honest intentions with which he had acted
throughout. Even the discovery of his long-lost Kitty's deceit and guilt
did not put his love to shame, or shake his determination to follow her to
her last resting-place. And the same was the feeling of his lordship. The
next day, as soon as the magistrates were satisfied that the law had not
been broken, both husbands accompanied the loved remains to Thorpe Church,
where the poor frail lady was buried with all the pomp and show which
could have been accorded to a real peeress. Which of the two paid the
undertaker's bill is not stated; but I have every reason to believe that
the cost was paid by Lord Dalmeny, or amicably settled between them. It is
said that the funeral cortege was stopped for a few minutes at the gates
of the vicarage, and that the young nobleman walked into the house, from
which he presently came forth arm-in-arm with Mr. Gough, who was clothed
in mourning as deep as his own, and with scarf and headband to match. This
happened on July 9, 1752.
After the funeral ceremony, Lord Dalmeny departed from the scene in
great grief and to all appearance quite inconsolable, declaring that he
should leave not only the shores of Essex, but those of England, for ever.
Whether he kept his word in this respect is more than I can tell; but the
tragical occurrence would seem to have shortened his days, for he survived
his beloved ‘Kitty' little more than three years, dying at the age of
thirty on August 11, 1755, in the lifetime of his father the earl, over
whom the grave closed in the November following.Apparently the name of
this Lord Dalmeny has been struck out of the existing ‘Peerages' on
account of the strange misalliance with which he connected the fair
escutcheon of the noble house of Primrose. As for Mr. Gough, he never
married a second time, being laid in his last resting-place at Thorpe in
July, 1774. The family of Cannon is extinct in the village; Kitty's
monument was removed some thirty years ago by the vicar, and a flat stone
was placed over her remains to form the floor of a vestry.
'So,' as one of her connections wrote to me in 1862, ‘there she is,
shut up out of sight and mind along with the parish registers, where her
burial is duly recorded; and every Sunday the officiating parson and clerk
tramp solemnly into church over the author of a scandal too great, and too
romantic also, to be forgotten, even in the third or fourth generation.
Kitty Cannon, or Kitty Gough; adds my correspondent, ' is I believe, the
first woman in England who had two husbands to follow her to the grave
together.'
It only remains to add that this story is told very briefly by
Chambers in his ‘Book of Days,' (vol. ii, p. 205,) and also at greater
length with more minuteness in Once a Week (vol. Vii.,) by a lady who
signs her name Diana Butler, who calls the lady 'Kitty Hancomb,’ and the
nobleman ' Lord Dalry,' doubtless in order to throw a thin veil over the
transaction which she relates. She, however, gives a portrait of ‘Kitty,'
taken from an original painting in her own possession, as I can certify.
Happily ‘Kitty ' left no child by either husband, and perhaps it is
fortunate that she never became a mother. The earldom of Rosebery devolved
on her second husband's next brother, whose great grandson is the present
peer.

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